Earth, upon which this moving, breathing life exists.May she bestow on us the finest of her harvests!
Earth, the all-sustaining, treasure-bearing, resting-place;
Golden-breasted Earth, home of all life,
Who bears the sacred fire.
Atharva Veda Book XII

Saturday, 30 August 2014

Older than the Himalaya, the Western Ghats, 1,600 km long
stretch, makes its way through 6 states. Its ecosystem plays a critical
role in influencing the monsoon and weather patterns in the
subcontinent. Known for its exceptionally high biodiversity and
endemism, unique only to this part of the world, it is home to Tiger
Reserves, National Parks, Wildlife Sanctuaries, and Reserved Forests. It
is the source of thousands of medicinal plants. What makes the Western
Ghats special is that while its total area is less than 6 % of the land
area of India, the Western Ghats contains more than 30% of all plant,
fish, bird, and mammal species found in India. It contains genetic
resources of numerous spices, grains and fruits. More importantly, the Ghats and its forests sustain the livelihoods
of approximately 245 million people who live in the Indian states that
receive most of their water supply from rivers originating in the
region.

When Jairam Ramesh was the Minister for Environment and Forest, he
commissioned renowned ecologist Madhav Gadgil to study the Western Ghats
and offer recommendations for its conservation. The report, when ready,
was neither shared and nor made public for over a year.

After PILs were filed, the Court ordered the MoEF to put the report
in the public domain - Gadgil called for the highest protection to the
Ghats and marked the entire Ghats as eco sensitive. He classified the
entire area into three zones, depending on how fragile it was. He also
recommended a gradual phasing out of all existing mining activities over
five years and no new licenses to be issued.

The then UPA Government squashed the report which was found to be
inconvenient to the wants of industry. The Kerala government was the
first to strongly oppose it claiming it is impractical and will come in
the way of its “development”. Other states chanted the same mantra
prompted by the mining and real estate lobbies.

Ramesh’s successor , Jayanti Natarajan, dismissed the report and
sought a second opinion - that in itself was wrong and caused some
amount of confusion .She commissioned K Kasturirangan to do another
study. When complete this study found that only 37% of the Western Ghats
is eco-sensitive and that mining, construction, dam-building and other
destructive activities can be allowed in the rest of the area of the
Ghats. Kasturirangan diluted the Gadgil report to favour industry and
appease the crony capitalists in all the states through which the Ghats
and its spurs run. Till now no decision has been taken in favour of
either report.

Madhav Gadgil is better placed than Kasturirangan to recommend to the
MoEFCC about protecting the Western Ghats - one is an ecologist who
knows the Western Ghats better than anyone else, the other a scientist,
and ex planning commission member.

Sadly the decision to reject the report was communicated on August 27
by the NDA government to the National Green Tribunal. Once again, the
debate is cast as a split: if you support Gadgil, you are called
anti-development, anti-growth, regressive etc. But the evidence has been
gathering all along the Ghats for decades - in an era of climate
instability, fast-changing monsoon patterns and the pressures of
urbanisation and resource extraction, the destruction of the Western
Ghats as is now being sanctioned by the BJP-led NDA government will
dangerously affect the climate of peninsular India and further endanger
the livelihoods and well-being of millions in the river basins whose
streams originate in these lush hills.

Those who support full and non-negotiable protection of the entire
Western Ghats are not idealists; they are amongst those Indians who keep
our connection with nature current, a connection that goes back to the
Vedas. It is capitalist forces and growth-obsessed policies that will,
if unchecked, brutally destroy that relationship – a relationship that
was celebrated in the hymns of the Rig Vedas.

It is in our long-term interest to protect every hillside and valley
and stream of the Western Ghats and not open up the fragile region to
senseless "development". If we do not, generations to come will pay a
huge price.This article first appeared in DNA on 29th August 2014

Friday, 1 August 2014

By
the end of the active stage of the ‘Green Revolution’, the result of
the long campaign had been to take away from Bharat’s farmers their
legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource
stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts.

The agro-ecological farming systems of Bharat have been placed under
modern threat from the time that the ‘Green Revolution’ was planned.
This planning became manifest through the direct policy support given to
the public finance and sanction given to the creation of ‘command
areas’ which were fed by the water collected behind new large dams. But
it also became manifest through the connections that were being created
between our national agricultural research system and the West, in
particular the agricultural universities of the USA.
That threat took form from the early 1960s, and one of its results
was to lead a generation of crop scientists, agricultural administrators
and State and Central Governments to accept ‘high yielding’ and
‘productivity’ and ‘hybrids’ as the only dimensions of the relationship
between staple crops and the provision of food to Bharat’s people. These
views were successfully marketed, thanks to sustained and continuous
support by the Government machinery, to the consuming public, and even
found place in school textbooks in all major languages. In this way, the
idea that a ‘scientific’ approach to new ways of growing our staple
crops was projected to our society as being the only modern way.
When this happened, for over a generation of younger citizens who
became adults in the early 2000s, the idea that agriculture is equal to
well-applied doses of science was one that went largely unquestioned.
Meanwhile, the role of the kisan was deliberately diminished. By the end
of the active stage of the ‘Green Revolution’, the result of the long
campaign had been to take away from Bharat’s farmers their legitimate
claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed
savers and hybridisation experts. Instead, they were reduced to becoming
recipients of technical fixes and consumers of the poisonous products
of a growing agricultural inputs industry.
It is against such a background – which is a chapter of the overall
transformation of the cultivation of food in Bharat – that the
opposition to genetically-modified crops and food is to be viewed. The
steadfast opposition to this technology is grounded in the recognition
that our country’s immense biodiversity of seeds, plants and life forms
is our collective heritage, which has evolved through the cumulative
innovations, adaptations and selections of many generations of
indigenous farming communities, for whom these seeds and life forms are
sacred.
When this position is understood, then the reason why genetically
modified organisms – uncontrollable and irreversible when let into the
agro-ecological environment – and their produce is so despised, becomes
plain. It is not a matter of science alone, as the geneticists and their
financiers claim, but has as much, if not more, to do with culture,
independence and self-reliance. These are essential aspects of the GM
discussion which the proponents and advocates cannot employ, because
none of these aspects favours their position.
Articles such as ‘GM crops debate can do without Swadeshi paranoia’ (by Surajit Dasgupta in Niticentral, 30 July 2014)
follow a pattern of advocacy. They treat technology of GM as being by
itself the silver bullet that can solve all crop problems, they elevate
GM scientists over all other science related to the practice of
agriculture, they denigrate shamefully and belittle the farmer and her
knowledge, they cast slurs on all those who are critical of GM and seek
to discredit them by citing academic papers and other material that
advocates GM. This is the pattern that we are seeing not only in Bharat,
but wherever there is opposition to GM and to the policies that the
technology depends on to enter a country.
The growing of our crop staples, of vegetables and fruit has to do
with a great deal more than the adoption of a particular technology. On
everything other than the need (always framed as urgent) to accept GM,
the proponents and advocates of this technology can join no discussion,
for that is the limit of their argument. For a generation, farmers’
groups and unions have been protesting the neglect that farm livelihoods
have been subjected to. They have protested (and continue to) policy
impacts that have caused the displacement of farmers in huge numbers
because smallholder farming earns them nothing, or because their farms
are swallowed up by racing urbanisation; they have been demanding a
minimum living income as a guarantee to all farm households, which must
be their due as food growers.
Who are they and what do they have? They have 85 per cent of the
total holdings in Bharat (117.60 million marginal and small holdings of
the total of 138.34 million) which account for 44.5 per cent of the land
area under agriculture (71.15 million hectares of the total of 159.59
million hectares). It is this large section of our people, the providers
of Bharat’s food on that 85 per cent of all farm holdings, whom we are
accustomed to call ‘annadaata‘, that is represented by
organisations like the Bhartiya Kisan Union, the largest farmers’ union
in the country, which has opposed GM crops (and field trials) from the
outset. “We are concerned about farm community’s and nation’s seed and
food sovereignty which will certainly be eroded when GMOs are pursued as
a technology,” was the BKU statement, which powerfully shows us why GM
is a socio-economic, ecological and cultural question, none of which are
subordinated to science.
This is what worries the growers of Bharat’s food. Technological and
market fixes have not shortened this list of worries but have done the
opposite. The subject for us is the growing of crop staples, or crop
choice, the methods used to cultivate, the support that the ‘kisan’
finds, and the environmental and cultural links between crop grower and
food consumer. When considering this multi-dimensional nature of food
and farming, it is important to note (which the GM advocates and
proponents omit) that conventional crop breeding continues to meet
important challenges like improving drought tolerance, improving
nitrogen fertiliser efficiency, and increasing yields according to the
contexts of the different agro-ecological regions in our country. When
we reached self-sufficiency in food staples, we did so by relying on
crop breeding together with providing support (erratic as it was, prone
to politically manipulation) to our ‘kisans’. Where then is the place
for GM?
There is none. That is why proponents have resorted to quoting papers
that are designed by institutions outside Bharat which have a great
interest in facilitating the grabbing of Bharat’s genetic commons and
bio-cultural heritage to be privatised and monopolised. The Bharat Beej
Swaraj Manch had stated their opposition to GM most forcefully in a
statement (released in New Delhi earlier this year): “We assert our
sovereign rights to freely plant, use, reproduce, select, improve,
adapt, save, share, exchange or sell our seeds – without restriction or
hindrance – as we have done for past millennia.” GM has no place in this
assertion, by a countrywide seed savers’ network, of the rights of
kisans.
There is no place for GM under any of the scenarios presented by the
proponents (climate change in particular). As an indication of our
enormous agro-diversity, the National Gene Bank of the National Bureau
of Plant Genetic Resources has said that its base collections total
402,894 accessions of 1,586 crop species. These include 159,569 cereals,
57,523 millets, 58,756 pulses or grain legumes, 58,477 oilseeds, 25,330
vegetables, 6,872 medicinal and aromatic plants, and 3,847 spices and
condiments. There is in this astonishing collection (and the kisans’ own
collections) all that our country needs to find staples that will deal,
as Surajit Dasgupta has mentioned, with “increasing temperatures,
decreased water availability in some places and flooding in others,
rising salinity, and changing pathogen and insect threats”.
The methods to deal with these have been practiced by the cultivating
households (of which there are many within our 167 million rural
households) in the 20 agro-ecological regions of Bharat and their 60
sub-regions over which are roughly apportioned the diversities of soil,
climate, physiography, the availability periods of conducive moisture
(which determines the length of growing seasons). They had perfected
crop rotations (largely abandoned by industrial agriculture) and which
can increase yields by even 20 per cent, the water holding capacity of
soils (woefully under-studied) had been improved, they lowered
susceptibility to drought by planting cover crops that increase soil
organic matter, they had saved themselves from water pollution by
nitrogen and the need for pesticides.
This is a small glimpse of the wider context in which the GM
advocates and proponents work, but they do so outside the dimension of
cognitive justice that ties us together – acknowledging the right for
different knowledge systems to exist with their associated practices,
livelihoods, ways of being, and ecologies to coexist. It is
organisations like Anchalika Krushak Sanghatan of Odisha, Bhu Adhikar
Abhiyan of Madhya Pradesh, Ekta Parishad, Gujarat Khedut Samaj, Bharat
Swabhimaan Andolan Lucknow, Shetkari Sanghatan of Maharastra that are
rearticulating this wider context in which GM and the techno-capital
domination is represents. These are a few amongst the many organisations
that have created diverse spaces which democratise food, its research
and its provision, and whose hundreds of thousands of members practice
bio-diverse ecological agriculture free from the narrow issues of
technology and its overlords.

About Me

A post graduation in Environmental Management from SOAS, UK, my areas of interest are ecology,environmental economics and policy, and Dharma . I write regularly in online media portals on issues of natural heritage and GM food.